A quick one before the Roundtable

The tag line for The Skeptic is “A tormented man’s reluctant search for greater meaning in his life.” Uh, no: that’s the synopsis for last week’s “Dr. Phil”. Actually, The Skeptic is a ghost story. But it’s a ghost story that spends about half its time crowing about how stunted and miserable people become if they question the Great Beyond.

Sure, I’ve seen much more aggressive and less technically-proficient attacks on rationality, but still: even when expressed so mildly, this sort of thing sets my teeth on edge. In fact, I found some of the implications so irritating that I had to comment on them, however briefly.

Fortunately, about halfway through, the movie forgets it has an axe to grind and remembers how to tell a story. But, oh, that first half…

1. Yes, it’s a judgemental world out there. I’m usually not even allowed to get away with my stock answer – “I don’t categorically disbelieve anything.” But I don’t honestly see how you could look at the images posted on the various science blogs and say that scientists lack imagination and a sense of wonder. I guess the problem is that the larger thing they believe in isn’t the right larger thing.

The doll is actually being lifted by one of the characters; there’s nothing supernatural about it. You’d figure that would make it less terrifying. But in context — with the music, and the editing, and the story having built to that point — it’s much, much worse.

And Tim Daly’s line immediately after seeing the doll made the hair I no longer have stand on end.

Like Will, I’d agree that there certainly are people who are so completely set in their ways that they’re not open to new evidence – but the ones I’ve met are more likely to be religious than skeptical. (Still, movie scientists are usually just as hard done by – Proving My Theory Correct is what matters to them, not gathering evidence or finding stuff out.)

In fact, I’m inclined to regard the movie-skeptic as a subclass of the movie-scientist – often damaged and doing it for personal reasons, utterly self-assured and self-important, unwilling or unable to engage with anything on an emotional level, and ignoring data until confronted with something that bites his leg off (physically or spiritually). Whether this is simply the standard scriptwriter’s presentation of someone smarter than he is, I don’t know…

One of my own more lovingly-clenched-to-chest personal theories is you (general you, that is) really can’t be the kind of scientist and/or spiritual person you want to be if you insist that narrowness is the way to knowledge of…whatever.

If that were true, half of the known elements would be laying around, waiting to be discovered, and slavery would be seen by the most elightened spiritual souls among us to be perfectly natural and part of “God’s Plan.”

Rigor does NOT equal tunnel vision. Spritual openness does NOT equal idiocy. Skepticism does NOT equal Dickhead. Well, they often do… but not because it’s required.

On a related note, one sort of pet peeve of mine is the number of movies that choose to have a main moral about the importance of belief. Belief in what, apparently, isn’t terribly important; the simple act of believing something that one has no rational reason to believe is presented as an obvious virtue in and of itself. (Often, even when religion isn’t explicitly invoked, this is presumably intended as a stand-in for religious faith, but this doesn’t seem to be always the case… sometimes it seems to be chosen simply because it’s an easy theme to stick in there and the filmmakers just didn’t think too hard about the implications.)

One particularly hamhanded example of such a movie that comes to mind is Polar Express, but it’s by no means alone.

“No, but, seriously…I have to know what I’m supposed to be believing IN. If I don’t my so called “belief” will be just as diffuse, vague, and weak as you seem to consider my so called current ‘skeptical state’ to be. Indeed, it seems that belief, in this instance, must be specific of necessity if it is to form any kind of weapon, whether defensive or offensive, against whatever evil you seem to need my help battling. ”

“Ehhh…you know, it’s people like you that killed Santa Claus.” *bursts into tears*